Illegitimate Knowledge and Liberatory Epistemology
Knowledge isn’t pure; it’s not neutral; It’s not floating above the blood-soaked history of power, untouched by politics, immune to corruption. Knowledge has always been wielded as a weapon—used to control, oppress, erase, and justify the worst horrors humanity has committed.
Genocide became a moral duty. Enslavement became an economic necessity. And knowledge was the weapon that made it all seem justifiable.
Look around you. Can you honestly say that academia, media, science, and religion are neutral? Do you actually believe that these institutions, which have long served the powerful, have somehow escaped the corruption that infects everything else? Or is it just easier for you to believe that?
Knowledge isn’t inherently good. In fact, in the wrong hands, it’s more often than not a force for evil. It’s time to stop pretending otherwise. If we want knowledge to be a tool for liberation, we have to fight for it. We have to tear down the lies we’ve been fed about its neutrality and purity and build a new way of knowing that serves justice.
And don’t comfort yourself with the belief that our ancestors were simply “less learned” and therefore innocent of the consequences of their knowledge systems. They knew. The people who built the intellectual foundations of colonialism, patriarchy, and racial hierarchies weren’t ignorant. They were intentional. They shaped knowledge in ways that served their interests, and they knew full well the violence and oppression their ideas would justify.
The knowledge systems they created weren’t accidents of a less-enlightened time—they were deliberate acts of power.
Myth #1: Knowledge Is Neutral
Let’s start with the most persistent lie: the idea that knowledge is neutral. This is the story we’re told from childhood—that facts are facts, data is data, and knowledge exists above the messiness of politics. But this isn’t just naive—it’s dangerous. Knowledge has never been neutral. It has always been created and shaped by those who hold power. And those who control knowledge control reality.
Think about history. European colonizers didn’t just show up with guns—they showed up with ideas. They arrived armed with pseudoscience, religious doctrine, and maps that erased entire peoples from existence. They didn’t just steal land and resources; they rewrote the story so that their brutality appeared noble.
Genocide became a moral duty. Enslavement became an economic necessity. And knowledge was the weapon that made it all seem justifiable.
Don’t comfort yourself by thinking they didn’t know better, that they were somehow operating in the darkness of ignorance. They knew exactly what they were doing. Their knowledge was never about discovering universal truths—it was about constructing narratives that justified their actions and maintained their dominance. And today, we are still living with the consequences of these deliberate distortions.
This isn’t just history—it’s a pattern. In Nazi Germany, racial “science” wasn’t some fringe belief. It was mainstream. Intellectuals twisted it into a rationale for genocide, making mass murder appear logical and necessary. These horrors weren’t committed by uninformed individuals—they were sanctioned by knowledge systems that made them seem inevitable.
The same dynamics are at play today, hidden behind sanitized language and bureaucratic policies. The same power structures are controlling knowledge, shaping it to serve their own interests, and framing it as “truth.”
Myth #2: Modern Knowledge Systems Are Objective and Benevolent
Maybe you think that today’s institutions are better, more objective, and less biased. But that’s just another myth. The same power dynamics that once justified slavery, genocide, and colonialism are still at work in our modern knowledge systems. They’ve just learned to disguise themselves more effectively.
Consider medicine and psychology. For centuries, these fields labeled women as “hysterical,” Black and Indigenous people as biologically inferior, and LGBTQ+ people as mentally ill. These weren’t just scientific errors—they were deliberate distortions used to maintain control. And these labels weren’t just theoretical—they shaped entire systems of violence and exclusion.
And don’t let yourself off the hook by assuming these systems were built by people who just “didn’t know better.” They knew exactly what they were doing. These labels were created to control populations, to rationalize exclusion and violence. The people who built these systems were well aware of the power they were wielding.
Do you really believe that today’s institutions have cleansed themselves of these biases? Or is it just easier to believe that? These systems haven’t magically become free of racism, sexism, and classism. They’re still deeply entrenched in power structures that prioritize the interests of the wealthy, the white, the male.
Myth #3: Knowledge Can Be Apolitical
This may be the most dangerous lie of all: the idea that knowledge can somehow float above politics, that it can remain untouched by power. It’s a comforting fantasy, one that allows people to believe they’re simply “following the facts” while ignoring how those facts were shaped by the people in control.
Take environmental science, for example. You might think it’s a neutral, data-driven field focused solely on saving the planet. But who controls the narrative on climate change? It’s the wealthy nations—the very ones that have contributed most to environmental destruction—who dominate the conversation. And who gets silenced? Indigenous communities, who have lived sustainably for millennia but whose knowledge is erased because it threatens the interests of those in power.
Neutrality is a smokescreen. It allows the powerful to shape knowledge in ways that benefit them, while convincing the rest of us that we’re simply being “rational.” The reality is that knowledge is always political.
Toward a Liberatory Epistemology
If we want to dismantle these myths, we need to radically rethink how we approach knowledge. A liberatory epistemology understands that knowledge is always tied to power. It refuses to serve the status quo. Instead, it seeks to disrupt, dismantle, and rebuild systems of knowledge so that they serve justice—not oppression. Here’s where we start:
1. Reject the Fantasy of Neutrality
The first step is to reject the fantasy that knowledge can ever be neutral. Every fact, every piece of data, every story is shaped by the context in which it was created. The question isn’t whether knowledge is biased—it’s whose interests that bias serves. If your knowledge allows you to remain comfortable while others suffer, then your knowledge is part of the problem.
2. Make Knowledge a Tool for Justice
Liberatory knowledge is not passive. It doesn’t sit idly in libraries or get debated endlessly in ivory towers. It’s a tool—a weapon—for justice. Feminism, Black radicalism, decolonial thought—these are not intellectual exercises. They are survival strategies. If your knowledge doesn’t compel you to act, then it’s not liberatory. It’s complicit.
3. Embrace Complexity
Oppression thrives on simplification—on dividing the world into neat binaries, good versus evil, civilized versus barbaric, “us” versus “them.” But human beings are not simple. And liberation requires that we embrace the messy, complicated realities of the world. Liberatory knowledge doesn’t flatten human experience into categories that serve the powerful. It revels in complexity because only through complexity can we dismantle the systems that seek to control us.
4. Validate Multiple Ways of Knowing
Western science and academia have long positioned themselves as the ultimate arbiters of truth. But that’s just another lie. Indigenous knowledge, oral traditions, lived experiences—these ways of knowing have been systematically erased, but they offer profound insights that are desperately needed. A liberatory epistemology validates these diverse forms of knowledge and recognizes that no single perspective holds all the answers.
5. Guard Against Co-optation
Radical ideas are always at risk of being co-opted by the status quo. Once-revolutionary movements get sanitized, commodified, and turned into hollow versions of their former selves.
This is how power defangs resistance—by turning it into something palatable for the masses. A liberatory epistemology must be vigilant, constantly guarding against the co-optation that turns radical ideas into empty slogans.
Reclaiming knowledge is not a one-time act. It’s a lifelong struggle. The systems that control knowledge are constantly adapting, constantly finding new ways to maintain power.
But that doesn’t mean we’re powerless. If we reclaim knowledge—if we use it as a tool for justice—we can turn the tide. But this requires vigilance, action, and an unwavering commitment to liberation.
So, what will you do? Will you continue to believe in the comforting myths that allow the world to keep burning?
